Evergreen Spectra III - VIA Cyrix III 600 MHz processor

Advantages: Cheap, respectable looking clockspeeds
Disadvantages: Blown away by the old Joshua design, nearly equalled by the MII at half the clock speed, bad benchmarks, bad press

...The VIACyrix III has proved to be a bit of a dissapointment although it wasnt always this way. Id readied myself since Christmas to get one of these. Up until recently the CyrixIII was based on the Joshua core from Cyrix. This was reasonably quick for the area that it was aimed at. It had a stonking great 64k L1 and 256k L2 cache with 3DNow! and was to be released at PR ratings of between 433 and 566 and be expected to ratchet up to around PR700-800 depending on how far the core could be pushed. However not long before relesase VIA chose to use the Winchip 4 core from Centaur and to be frank this core doesnt have a patch on Joshua, in fact its crap. The benchmarks have come out and based on the benchmarks I saw, comparing the NewCyrixIII-533 and the NewCyrixIII-666 and the Cyrix MII-333 and the JoshuaCyrixIII-PR433 the new Centaur core... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: cheap, cheap motherboards available
Disadvantages: pretty slow, can get better performance if you dont pay too much more

...The Cyrix III from what I can gather was going to be based on a rather promising looking design from Cyrix, however VIA stepped in and seemingly ruined this by putting the design from the Centaur or Winchip team in. This has had disasterous consequences with the CPU becoming a laughing stock because of its very poor benchmarks. Its the one CPU that makes my Cyrix MII look speedy!!!!! I am trying to find a reason to reccommend this CPU to you and thinking about it I can only think of 1 and that is price. However I then think that you can get a 600 Duron for only slightly more and this is supposed to be a lot quicker than a Celeron and yet the Celeron leaves the Cyrix III trailing in its dust. However the one thing the Cyrix III has in its favour over the Duron is that you can pick up cheapish socket 370 motherboards particularly ones... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

Advantages: Good price, life time warranty, new technology for old pc's
Disadvantages: Might work as a bottle neck, if your pc lacks RAM

...The evergreen Spectra 333 is a direct replacment for you old Pentium CPU, it replaces Pentium 75Mhz and up and offers a big boost in performance. The upgrade uses an AMD K6 II as the CPU and comes on an adapter board that alters the voltage to make it compatable with your system, the heatsink and fan are also provided as are BIOS updates. It also uses 3D Now technology to provide extra support for graphics in games and general applications. If you can not afford another another computer or can not afford to upgrade the motherboard and processor, then the Spectra 333 is an affordable compromise for your system. The price may seem high at first until you take into account that a new motherboard and memory are not required. The price is around the £120 mark, but cheaper ones are available. Easily a good choice if your old computer can... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average off topic